Marie Corelli and Fin de Siècle Feminism

Marie Corelli and Fin de Siècle Feminism JANET GALLIGANI CASEY University of Delaware The high-level reader of Marie Corelli... is impelled to laugh, so ridiculously inadequate to the issues raised is the equipment of the mind that resolutely tackles them, and, on the other hand, so absurdly out of proportion is the energy expended to the objects that aroused it (for instance, in Marie Corelli's novels, female smoking and low-cut gowns). THIS OPINION, expressed in the 1930s by Q. D. Leavis,1 is but a succinct version of the lengthier invectives hurled by critics against Marie Corelli in her lifetime (1855-1924). Although Corelli's liveliness and sincerity were not infrequently admired by her contemporaries (Rebecca West, for instance, wrote of the novelist's "demoniac vitality"2), she was never to enjoy critical acclaim. In a notice of her death, one London journalist wrote, "Even the most lenient critic cannot regard Miss Corelli's works as of much literary importance."3 Sentiment toward Corelli has not softened among those few modern scholars who are familiar with her work: her literary powers are admittedly not sophisticated, and "No one questions the judgement literary history has placed upon [her]."4 Yet it is impossible to ignore the hard facts of booksellers' records at the turn of the century, for this now forgotten novelist was phenomenally popular. More than half of her thirty books were world bestsellers, translated into virtually every European language and many Asian languages; at the height of her fame, in 1906, over 100,000 copies of her books were sold, more than those sold by Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells combined. Such popularity took strange forms; at a public appearance in Leeds, for instance, "women fought with each other to get near her and tried to kiss the hem of her dress."6 Q. D. Leavis, again echoing the standard critical opinion, asserts that Marie Corelli's success "illustrate [s] the immense drop from the highly critical 163 ELT : VOLUME 35:2 1992 and intelligent society [of the early Victorians] to later Victorian taste."6 Perhaps. Yet surely Corelli's popularity reveals more to us than this; as Richard Kowalczyk suggests, it "allows us to understand popular culture at the turn of the century, its common feelings, moral preferences, and psychological needs."7 Various critics, notably Kowalczyk in his several articles on Corelli,8 have commented on the novelist's preoccupation with such Victorian themes as the reconciliation of Christian tradition and evolutionary theory, the need for social reform, and the potential of science. Corelli's numerous statements on the status of women, however, have not been adequately considered. Although the handful of twentieth-century scholars who have studied Corelli consistently note her outspoken views in both fiction and nonfiction on this subject, her opinions are often summarily dismissed because they are highly contradictory. Yet it is precisely her inconsistency regarding this issue, coupled with her immense popularity, that makes her unique and worthy of further study: clearly she reflects the confusion of an entire generation of women, a generation confronted at once with the suffragette movement and the decline of the feminine ideal as perceived in the Victorian age. Marie Corelli, highly successful in a publishing world dominated by men, financially independent, outspoken, and in a limited sense an early feminist, produced novels and prose tracts in which the "perfect" woman is often nothing more than the fulfillment of Coventry Patmore's "Angel in the House" ideal. Her conflicting views of womanhood make her a notable transitional figure among the "literary feminists"—a curious link between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.9 Corelli's "statements" on the female role were initially indirect—that is, they were embodied in her fiction, beginning with her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). In this thematic preoccupation Corelli was not alone. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, public debate on the issues of marriage, divorce, and the general character of the female raged in England both publicly and privately, in newspapers and periodicals as well as in forums such as "The Men and Women's Club," which met from 1885-1889 to "discuss...